tax

To the uninitiated, nothing may be more boring than economics, and especially international trade talks. I know that because 15 years ago I was one of the uninitiated.

Bill Moyers of Moyers & Company, on February 21, 2014, interviewed Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member, who, during the interview, confirmed what many Americans already suspect: America has become a corporate state, or to use Lofgren’s words, a “Deep State,” which he defines as a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state.

Like ravenous beasts of prey attacking a weakened antelope, the forces of subsidized capital and their mercenaries sunk their fangs into the United Auto Workers (UAW) and its organizing drive at the Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The UAW narrowly lost – 712 to 626 – and the baying pack of plutocrats exalted, as if they had just saved western civilization in the anti-union, lower-wage South.

In early February, Providence mayoral candidate Brett Smiley, who is running in the Democratic primary but currently holds no elected position, submitted a bill to the Rhode Island General Assembly with the help of State Senator Gayle Goldin and State Representative Maria Cimini that, if passed, would impose a ten percent sales tax on all guns and ammo sold in Rhode Island.

The question is no longer what, the question is when.
Very soon, income inequality in the United States will reach such a critical level it is likely violence will be viewed as an acceptable response to America’s social ills.
Unlike Depression Era bank robbers, assaults will be aimed at soft human targets. After all, who uses cash anymore?

The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has.
— Will Rogers
Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s…
— Jesus of Nazareth

Here are the top ten examples of corporate welfare and welfare for the rich.   There are actually thousands of tax breaks and subsidies for the rich and corporations provided by federal, state and local governments but these ten will give a taste.

Precaution. Stop shifting the baseline. Stop mucking around because you have no common sense but plenty of computer engineering ADD-ADHD or what have you, on that autism spectrum. What have you, stop enlisting these money changers and game changers to define community.

In science, a theory is abandoned or substantially modified if it does not concur with the emerging facts, fails to predict important events, or is contradicted by experiments. That, alas, does not seem to apply to economic theories.
Free-market (neo-liberal) capitalism has been the dominant type of capitalism for the last three decades; it failed spectacularly to predict the 2008 global economic crash, the second largest economic crisis in history, after the great depression.

Here it is, really – the bold-two/faced lie of the liberal class, the 19 percenters holding up their share of the pain for the rest of us. We make paltry livings and have zero benefits. We see the cuts to food assistance, see the massive funding of transfinancials through our hard-earned work. We see the dumbdowning of America, the dog-eat-dog reality of these rabid souls. You can name them in your nightmares, or see them on Charlie Rose.